In December when Shenzhen Xunlong Software announced its open-spec, Linux- and Android-ready Orange Pi and Orange Pi Mini SBCs, both of which use the dual-core, Cortex-A7 Allwinner A20 system-on-chip, the company also briefly noted an upcoming, quad-core Orange Pi Plus. The Plus was said to offer a quad-core, Cortex-A7 Allwinner A31 SoC with a PowerVR SGX544MP2 GPU. Instead, the shipping version, now available at AliExpress for $59, arrives with Allwinner’s new quad-core Cortex–A7 based H3 SoC and a Mali-400 MP2 GPU.

Upon first boot, Elementary obviously is designed to look and function like OS X. Although that might turn the stomachs of die-hard Linux fans, it provides an interesting platform for folks who appreciate the clean, functional layout Apple provides on its flagship OS. Elementary OS includes the Ubuntu Software Center, and like most variants, it can install any program in the Ubuntu repositories. Out of the box, however, it's a clean, fast operating system that people familiar with OS X will recognize right away.

Linux kernel 3.19 has been officially announced by none other than its father, Linus Torvalds, on February 8, 2015. It is a great release that brings some very interesting features. Because we didn’t have access to a complete list of its features at the moment of writing the news article about its availability, we have decided to drop another one that highlights Linux 3.19 kernel’s prominent features.

Amazing, simply amazing! We have no idea how many Ubuntu phone units were sold today, but after only three hours all available BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition smartphones were sold out. Looks like the Ubuntu community in Europe is really strong, as they also had to face some server issues with BQ’s online store, which apparently was not prepared for a large crowd.

The prolific developers at Red Hat have been relatively quiet in the New Year. Now, the open source leader is picking up the pace with the introduction of the latest version of its enterprise virtualization tool.

The company announced general availability this week of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.5 aiming to offer tighter integration with OpenStack while promising to ease deployment of IT infrastructures for traditional virtualization workloads along with enterprise-level cloud infrastructure.

Google today launched PerfKit, an open-source cloud-benchmarking tool that, in Google’s words, is an “effort to define a canonical set of benchmarks to measure and compare cloud offerings.” The PerfKit tools currently support Google’s own Compute Engine, Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure clouds. Google says it has worked on this project with over 30 researchers, companies and customers, including ARM, Canonical, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Rackspace and Red Hat.

If we're going to do DevOps, we have to give up open source. Right? Wait, we're an Agile shop, so we have to give that up, too. Right?

Over the last five years or so, I've talked with a lot of people confused about what it means to "do DevOps,” and clearly concerned about having to give up other things that have already proven their value in order to adopt DevOps. The bad news is, we've not done a good job in the DevOps community of nailing down what DevOps is and what it isn't at an earlier stage in our development.

Cisco is developing open source tools designed to allow network operators to describe policy in more meaningful terms.

The Noiro Networks team inside Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) is trying to solve the problem of network policy that doesn't make sense in an application-centric world. Typical networking policy uses networking language -- describing traffic flows or or whether specific ports are allowed to connect with each other. Instead, the Noiro Networks team is looking to describe policies in terms of how applications are allowed to interoperate, says Thomas Graf, a principal software engineer at Cisco working on Noiro Networks.

Former Unbounded Robotics execs have launched “Fetch Robotics” with $3 million in funding, and will ship a ROS-on-Linux mobile manipulator bot in Q2 2015.

A startup called Fetch Robotics has announced $3 million in Series A financing from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) and Shasta Ventures, along with a development team that jumped from the apparently now defunct Unbounded Robotics. Fetch Robotics plans to announce and ship two mobile manipulation robots in the second quarter that are aimed principally at the logistics and light industrial markets, “as well as for other human-robot collaboration opportunities,” says the company.

Sony's been trying the smartwatch thing for years, but the original SmartWatch and the SmartWatch 2 both... what's the word I'm looking for here? Sucked? Yeah. But the SmartWatch 3 has solid performance and two nifty features you won't find on any other Android Wear. It's the first with built-in GPS and a screen you can read without backlighting.

Android Wear watches are off to a pretty decent start. The Moto 360, the LG G Watch R, and the Asus ZenWatch are all lovely and useful in their own ways. So why might you buy a Sony smartwatch instead?

After releasing Android 5.0 Lollipop updates for a variety of top flagship handsets in the past weeks, including the Galaxy S5 and Galaxy Note 3, Samsung has started rolling out the one official Lollipop ROM certain smartphone buyers were waiting for, the one made for the Galaxy Note 4.

Regardless of the tinkering Google's engineers have done under the bonnet, the most noticeable improvement has to be the overall look. Google is calling Android's fetching new aesthetic "Material Design" and it's all about giving the OS a more welcoming look. It's mostly flat colours, clever use of shadow and UI elements which look like layers of paper stacked on top of one another. Google has left behind the world of skeuomorphic design ­–– just like Apple did with iOS 7 –– and the end result is something that looks less cluttered and more eye-catching.

If you're wondering about any file-system performance changes for XFS/EXT4/Btrfs/F2FS when operating on a single SSD, I ran the vanilla Linux 3.18 vs. 3.19 benchmarks this weekend on an ASUS Zenbook UX301LAA with Intel Core i7 4558U Haswell processor and the file-system tests targeting the secondary 128GB SanDisk SATA3 SSD with this ultrabook. A development snapshot of Ubuntu 15.04 x86_64 was used for this kernel/file-system comparison with its updated file-system user-space utilities. For this testing, the stock mount options of each file-system was used.

The changes going in through Ingo Molnar's branches aren't incredibly exciting this round, but it looks like the scheduler tree updates have the potential to be semi-exciting. In particular, the kernel scheduler changes have minor micro-optimizations, various fixes and enhancements, and a idle-poll handler fix that has the potential to result in power-savings.

You can answer three questions to choose between Linux or Windows, and you can gripe about how Windows is killing the traditional desktop, but all that is fluff. The purpose of an operating system is to put forth an environment where you can get things done—where you can get things done. You are what matters and everything else is bullshit.

The Univention Corporate Server (UCS) enterprise-ready Linux server distribution based on the Debian GNU/Linux operating system has been updated today, February 11, to version 4.0-1, a minor release that includes an updated Debian base and various tweaks.

The famous gThumb image viewer application for the GNOME desktop environment reached version 3.3.3 a few days ago, as announced on GNOME’s announce list by Paolo Bacchilega. This is a development release that brings numerous important changes, which will be part of the forthcoming gThumb 3.4 release.